HYE YEON NAM

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist working on interactive installations and performance video. Through her art, which she approaches as research, Nam attempts to address social issues she sees as closely tied to her cultural identity, relationships, and responsibilities. As an immigrant to America from South Korea, She is acutely aware of her identity being caught between these two cultures. While struggling to adjust to the culture of her adopted home, she has sought to illustrate her “resistance against the conformities of society by showing variable perspectives and physical dissonance.”

Nam, in describing her work, adds that she “foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange, and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways.”

Her work has been showcased in The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., in Times Square (New York, NY), The E3 Expo (Los Angels, CA), and several festivals in China, Istanbul, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. She is currently an assistant professor of digital art at Louisiana State University.

“To me, art should not merely be aesthetics; instead, it can be a question, an argument, a proposal, a resolution or a reflection of the various problems that we encounter in our world. Creating projects related to social issues has helped me understand myself instead of my own isolated viewpoint.”